The present invention relates to the setting of the voice personality of a voice service site.
In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of services available over the World Wide Web on the public internet (generally referred to as the xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d), the web being composed of a myriad of pages linked together by hyperlinks and delivered by servers on request using the HTTP protocol. Each page comprises content marked up with tags to enable the receiving application (typically a GUI browser) to render the page content in the manner intended by the page author; the markup language used for standard web pages is HTML (HyperText Markup Language).
However, today far more people have access to a telephone than have access to a computer with an Internet connection. Sales of cellphones are outstripping PC sales so that many people have already or soon will have a phone within reach where ever they go. As a result, there is increasing interest in being able to access web-based services from phones. xe2x80x98Voice Browsersxe2x80x99 offer the promise of allowing everyone to access web-based services from any phone, making it practical to access the Web any time and any where, whether at home, on the move, or at work.
Voice browsers allow people to access the Web using speech synthesis, pre-recorded audio, and speech recognition. FIG. 1 of the accompanying drawings illustrates the general role played by a voice browser. As can be seen, a voice browser is interposed between a user 2 and a voice page server 4. This server 4 holds voice service pages (text pages) that are marked-up with tags of a voice-related markup language (or languages). When a page is requested by the user 2, it is interpreted at a top level (dialog level) by a dialog manager 7 of the voice browser 3 and output intended for the user is passed in text form to a Text-To-Speech (TTS) converter 6 which provides appropriate voice output to the user. User voice input is converted to text by speech recognition module 5 of the voice browser 3 and the dialog manager 7 determines what action is to be taken according to the received input and the directions in the original page. The voice input/output interface can be supplemented by keypads and small displays.
In general terms, therefore, a voice browser can be considered as a largely software device which interprets a voice markup language and generate a dialog with voice output, and possibly other output modalities, and/or voice input, and possibly other modalities (this definition derives from a working draft, dated September 2000, of the Voice browser Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium).
Voice browsers may also be used together with graphical displays, keyboards, and pointing devices (e.g. a mouse) in order to produce a rich xe2x80x9cmultimodal voice browserxe2x80x9d. Voice interfaces and the keyboard, pointing device and display maybe used as alternate interfaces to the same service or could be seen as being used together to give a rich interface using all these modes combined.
Some examples of devices that allow multimodal interactions could be multimedia PC, or a communication appliance incorporating a display, keyboard, microphone and speaker/headset, an in car Voice Browser might have display and speech interfaces that could work together, or a Kiosk.
Some services may use all the modes together to provide an enhanced user experience, for example, a user could touch a street map displayed on a touch sensitive display and say xe2x80x9cTell me how I get here?xe2x80x9d. Some services might offer alternate interfaces allowing the user flexibility when doing different activities. For example while driving speech could be used to access services, but a passenger might used the keyboard.
FIG. 2 of the accompanying drawings shows in greater detail the components of an example voice browser for handling voice pages 15 marked up with tags related to four different voice markup languages, namely:
tags of a dialog markup language that serves to specify voice dialog behaviour;
tags of a multimodal markup language that extends the dialog markup language to support other input modes (keyboard, mouse, etc.) and output modes (large and small screens);
tags of a speech grammar markup language that serve to specify the grammar of user input; and
tags of a speech synthesis markup language that serve to specify voice characteristics, types of sentences, word emphasis, etc.
When a page 15 is loaded into the voice browser, dialog manager 7 determines from the dialog tags and multimodal tags what actions are to be taken (the dialog manager being programmed to understand both the dialog and multimodal languages 19). These actions may include auxiliary functions 18 (available at any time during page processing) accessible through APIs and including such things as database lookups, user identity and validation, telephone call control etc. When speech output to the user is called for, the semantics of the output is passed, with any associated speech synthesis tags, to output channel 12 where a language generator 23 produces the final text to be rendered into speech by text-to-speech converter 6 and output to speaker 17. In the simplest case, the text to be rendered into speech is fully specified in the voice page 15 and the language generator 23 is not required for generating the final output text; however, in more complex cases, only semantic elements are passed, embedded in tags of a natural language semantics markup language (not depicted in FIG. 2) that is understood by the language generator. The TTS converter 6 takes account of the speech synthesis tags when effecting text to speech conversion for which purpose it is cognisant of the speech synthesis markup language 25.
The way the synthesized voice sounds (which is referred to herein as the xe2x80x98voice personalityxe2x80x99 since the synthesized voice can be made to imitate a particular person) depends on an implicit or explicit set of characterisers 30 of the process used for voice synthesis. Thus, if the voice output is synthesised using a voie tract model, then the characterisers setting the voice personality are the parameters of the model; alternatively, if the voice output is synthesised by the concatenation of digitised voice elements such as phonemes, allophones, diphones or the like, then these elements (which may have been derived from a particular celebrity) constitute the characterisers of the voice personality.
User voice input is received by microphone 16 and supplied to an input channel of the voice browser. Speech recogniser 5 generates text which is fed to a language understanding module 21 to produce semantics of the input for passing to the dialog manager 7. The speech recogniser 5 and language understanding module 21 work according to specific lexicon and grammar markup language 22 and, of course, take account of any grammar tags related to the current input that appear in page 15. The semantic output to the dialog manager 7 may simply be a permitted input word or may be more complex and include embedded tags of a natural language semantics markup language. The dialog manager 7 determines what action to take next (including, for example, fetching another page) based on the received user input and the dialog tags in the current page 15.
Any multimodal tags in the voice page 15 are used to control and interpret multimodal input/output.
Whatever its precise form, the voice browser can be located at any point between the user and the voice page server. FIGS. 3 to 5 illustrate three possibilities in the case where the voice browser functionality is kept all together; many other possibilities exist when the functional components of the voice browser are separated and located in different logical/physical locations.
In FIG. 3, the voice browser 3 is depicted as incorporated into an end-user system 8 (such as a PC or mobile entity) associated with user 2. In this case, the voice page server 4 is connected to the voice browser 3 by any suitable data-capable bearer service extending across one or more networks 9 that serve to provide connectivity between server 4 and end-user system 8. The data-capable bearer service is only required to carry text-based pages and therefore does not require a high bandwidth.
FIG. 4 shows the voice browser 3 as co-located with the voice page server 4. In this case, voice input/output is passed across a voice network 9 between the end-user system 8 and the voice browser 3 at the voice page server site. The fact that the voice service is embodied as voice pages interpreted by a voice browser is not apparent to the user or network and the service could be implemented in other ways without the user or network being aware.
In FIG. 5, the voice browser 3 is located in the network infrastructure between the end-user system 8 and the voice page server 4, voice input and output passing between the end-user system and voice browser over one network leg, and voice-page text data passing between the voice page server 4 and voice browser 3 over another network leg. This arrangement has certain advantages; in particular, by locating expensive resources (speech recognition, TTS converter) in the network, they can be used for many different users with user profiles being used to customise the voice-browser service provided to each user.
Voice-based services are highly attractive because of their ease of use. However, the reaction of users to different voice output personalities can vary widelyxe2x80x94one voice personality can encourage a certain class of users whilst alienating a different class.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus by which voice services can be presented to users with voice personalities with which the user is comfortable.
According to one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method of setting the voice personality of a voice service site, wherein the voice personality characterisers associated with a previously-visited voice service site are used in presenting the voice output of a currently-visited voice service site.
Typically, the voice service sites operate by serving, from voice page servers, voice pages in the form of text with embedded voice markup tags to a voice browser, the voice browser interpreting these pages and carrying out speech recognition of user voice input, text to speech conversion to generate voice output, and dialog management; the voice browser being disposed between voice page servers and the user. In this case, it is the browser that manages which set of voice personality characterisers is used in rendering a particular voice page.
The voice personality characterisers preferably have associated usage permissions regarding what sites can use the characterisers. Voice service sites may also specify whether external voice personality characterisers can be used for presenting the voice output of the site.
According to another aspect of the present invention, there is provided apparatus comprising:
voice-service access means for accessing different voice service sites;
voice-service presentation means for presenting the output from an accessed voice service site using a voice set by a selected set of voice personality characterisers; and
selection means for selecting the set of voice personality characterisers to be used by the voice-service presentation means to present the currently accessed site, the selection means being operative to enable a set of voice personality characterisers associated with a previously-accessed voice service site to be selected for use in presenting a currently-visited voice service site.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, there is provided a server site holding sets of voice personality characterisers for imparting particular voice personalities to the presentation of the output of voice service sites, said sets having associated usage permissions regarding use of the sets in presenting voice sites.